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Showing posts from January, 2020

Flow Reactor Created that Will Be Able to Mass Produce Amino Acids

Researchers at Kyushu University have developed highly efficient amino acid synthesis from biomass-derivable acids and water using electric energy. Amino acids are the basic building blocks of proteins and are also involved in various functional materials such as feed additives, flavor enhancers, and pharmaceuticals. Above – A demonstration flow reactor constructed by researchers at Kyushu University continuously converts source materials into amino acids through a reaction driven by electricity. By choosing the right combination of electrocatalyst and source materials, the researchers achieved highly efficient synthesis of amino acids. This method for producing amino acids is less resource intensive than current

Dolittle Originally Didn’t Have as Much Butt Stuff

Dolittle ends with Robert Downey Jr. putting his hands up a dragon’s ass . If you hadn’t heard that, you didn’t read our review where I said the exact same thing. Is it a spoiler? Yes. But it’s such a wild thing to say that your instincts are to assume it couldn’t be true. We assure you, it is. Read more...

This Vicks Humidifier Is Perfect For My Closet-Sized Apartment Bedroom

One morning earlier this month, while I was out of town, I received the following text from one of my roommates: Read more...

Do You Think in Words?

A question for you: When you are aware of your own consciousness—meaning your own individual scattershot thoughts, like what to make for lunch, whether to cross the street, or when it’s time to go hit the pillow—what do you hear? That is, do you “hear” your own voice in your head? Or do you hear nothing at all? Read more...

Tiny DeLoreans, Big Bugs, and Yet Another Baby Yoda Are Among the Week’s Best Toys

Welcome back to Toy Aisle, io9’s regular round-up of the latest and greatest toys and merchandise. This week, a very buggy action figure, Pokémon gets its skate on, and Hot Toys makes a promise to bring so much Baby Yoda into your life. Check it out! Read more...

Fast 9's Trailer Doesn’t Take Us to Space But It Does Have Rockets and Resurrection

Now that the Fast and Furious has finally gone sci-fi , nothing is off-limits. And you see that in the first trailer for F9 , the official title of the ninth Fast and Furious film. This time around they’re strapping rockets to cars. Read more...

A Spectacular Fireball Lights Up the English Sky

Check out this incredible photo of a streaking fireball, which appeared over England last week. Read more...

io9 Roundtable: The Good Place Was a Good Show

The Good Place —NBC’s poignant, brilliant, and hilarious afterlife comedy—has ended, and last night’s series finale showed us the fates of all the characters we’d come to forking adore over the past four seasons . Dive into the chowder fountain with us while we celebrate (and mourn) one of our favorite shows. Read more...

Screw Going to Work, Stay Home With One Of These Mynt Massagers While They're 35% Off

Mynt Shiatsu Massager Gold Box | Amazon Read more...

Marvel's Loki Show Is Gaining Owen Wilson

While the God of Mischief is usually fighting with the God of Thunder, he may soon have Lightning to deal with too. Read more...

Astrophysicists Observe Star Dragging Space-Time

Scientists have observed a spinning star dragging space-time along with it, according to a new paper. Read more...

The Evil Finale Took Quite the Devilish Twist

Evil certainly had its share of surprises throughout its freshman season. Mostly, they had to do with the grisly mysteries taken on by its trio of Catholic Church-sponsored investigators , but its characters also sometimes did things you wouldn’t expect. The finale, “Book 27,” dropped the biggest Evil shock yet. Read more...

Locke & Key's Latest Trailer Makes the Series' Horrors Look Fun

The premise of Netflix’s upcoming adaptation of Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodríguez’s Locke & Key is rather alarming on its face, but in the latest trailer for the series, all of the Locke children seem to be having a damned good time running around a magical house full of otherworldly threats that almost certainly want to… Read more...

How to Measure Almost Anything Using Your Phone

Your phone can do it all. It’s a portable music player, diary, digital camera, communication device, calculator, and just about everything else. But you might not have considered that it can also replace your measuring tape. With the right sensors on board and the right apps installed, you can measure more data with… Read more...

All the Brand-New Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books You Need to Know About for February

February may be the shortest month , even in a leap year, but we still have a jumbo-sized list of new sci-fi, fantasy, and horror books for your reading consideration. Dig in for tales of magical assassins, space shenanigans, witches and warlords, scheming royals, doomed planets (including Earth), and more. Read more...

Friday's Best Deals: Jach's Sweaters, Cole Haan, Tactical Sporks, and More

An Anker wall adapter , LG monitor , an itty-bitty lighter , and New Balance shoes lead off Friday’s best deals from around the web. Read more...

New Looks at A Quiet Place 2 Reveal the Sequel Will Answer the First Movie's Biggest Mysteries

As terrifying as A Quiet Place ’s sound-seeking monsters were in their own right, what made the film so intense was the unsettling atmosphere that shaped its characters’ lives. While you knew that the Abbott family was in a constant state of danger , the movie provided little explanation about what the creatures were ,… Read more...

What We Loved And Hated About Mythic Quest, A TV Show About A Fictional Game Studio

My coworker Ethan Gach and I watched press screeners of the first season of Mythic Quest: Raven’s Banquet , a sitcom that premieres on Apple’s new streaming service on February 7. Mythic Quest is a workplace comedy about a video game studio. We’re pretty mixed: Parts of the show are hilarious, others are touching, and… Read more...

Updates From the Little Shop of Horrors Remake, the New Willow, and More

Shang-Chi may be casting some super spies. Work’s already begun on Servant ’s second season. The 100 spinoff series has been given a slithery subtitle. Plus, what’s to come when The Walking Dead returns, Sue Dearborn arrives on The Flash , and Jason Segel gets inducted into the Elsewhere Society. To me, my spoilers! Read more...

Give Your Home a Brain With Amazon's Smart Home Product Sale

Smart Home Product Gold Box | Amazon Read more...

Frozen II's Evolution From Storyboards to Final Film Is Incredible

Disney’s biggest secret isn’t a secret at all . It’s that before any of its animated productions significantly move ahead, the filmmakers use rough storyboards to plot out the whole movie. They then screen it for internal audiences to get feedback. That feedback is digested, changes are made, and then it happens again… Read more...

Scientists Turned a Normal Jellyfish Into a Speedy Cyborg Jellyfish

Jellyfish are the most efficient swimmers in the ocean, albeit fairly slow ones. Researchers at Stanford University made a jellyfish swim three times faster by sticking a motor to it, creating a biohybrid robot with the jellyfish as the “scaffold.” Read more...

A Robotic Swinging Spider-Man Is Coming to Disneyland This Summer

After first revealing what many speculated to be robotic stunt doubles several years ago, today the official Disney Parks Blog confirmed that Disney Research’s swinging, posing, self-contained animatronic trapeze artists will be used to create a real-life version of Spider-Man swinging over the upcoming Avengers Campus Read more...

Lego Masters' Superstar Tells Us How to Become a Professional Builder

Wanting to make a show about Lego is one thing. Actually making a show about Lego is something else. You’d need an expert. Someone to make sure you were doing things right and had everything you need. You’d need someone like Nathan Sawaya . Read more...

Megawatt Class Direct Fusion Drive For 25X ISP and 3 Times Faster to Pluto

Princeton Satellite has had various NASA, SBIR and IR&D grants to develop a multi- megawatt-class nuclear fusion propulsion and space power system. This funding has enabled them to precisely simulate their designs and performed experiments. They have stated they would need $100 million and five years to actually make a full megawatt propulsion system. They have not received the level of funding needed to proceed with the main development. Studies of electron heating in PFRC-2 surpassed theoretical predictions and recently reaching 500 eV with pulse lengths of 300 ms, and experiments to measure ion heating with input power up to

Arrow's Bright Green Tease Was About Exactly What You Thought It Was

Arrow ’s season finale bid farewell to Oliver Queen and gave us all the briefest of glimpses of the lives his former teammates would go on to lead in the wake of the original Green Arrow’s death . The show’s heroes aren’t completely disappearing from the Arrowverse, but for at least one of them, Arrow made clear that… Read more...

My Platinum Blonde Hair Has Gone Hideously Brassy, Please Help!

Welcome to SELF KERR, a new column in which noted Fixer of Problems, Jolie Kerr , will help you with your most vexing grooming, wellness and self-care issues. Benign nail fungus got you down? Are you looking for bath products that won’t make a huge mess of your tub?? Are you plagued by bruises that linger forever??? … Read more...

Star Trek: Picard's First Episode Is Free to Engage on YouTube

Curious what that whole Star Trek: Picard thing is all about? CBS All Access has made the first episode of the latest Star Trek series free to watch on YouTube in the U.S., meaning it’s all systems go for the series premiere even if you don’t have the streaming platform. Read more...

After an 80-Year Quest, Scientists Have Almost Certainly Discovered Metallic Hydrogen

Newly published results offer compelling evidence that hydrogen is a metal at extremely high pressures. But is the research enough to convince the field at large that metallic hydrogen exists? Read more...

Stay In Bed Wrapped Up Under This $20 Heated Electric Blanket

Biddeford Heated Electric Blanket | $20 | Walmart Read more...

Carnival of Space 647

The Carnival of Space 647 is up at Urban Astronomer. Universe Today reports that the Hubble space telescope found tiny clumps of dark matter. Dark Matter is believed to make up the bulk of the Universe’s mass and is the scaffolding on which galaxies are built. We cannot directly see Dark Matter but have to measure how the presence of Dark Matter by watching stars and galaxies in an area. Evidence of dark matter clumps have been seen around medium and large galaxies. Hubble images showed that light coming from eight quasars was subject to a gravitational lensing effect that

5 Essential Good Place Episodes to Watch Before the Series Finale Breaks Our Forking Hearts

Our time in the Good Place is almost at an end , having spent four forking fantasic seasons with Eleanor, Chidi, Jason, Tahani, Michael, and Janet. As we get ready for the series finale of The Good Place , we thought we’d look back at its most pivotal episodes: the ones that made us cry , the ones that made us think, and… Read more...

The Agony and the Ecstasy of the Concord Grape

In 1849, Ephraim Wales Bull strolled through rows of wild grapes in his Concord, Massachusetts yard, each plant’s bare limbs spread out as if shrugging. After more than a decade experimenting with Isabella grapes that wouldn’t ripen outdoors and musty-tasting wild grapes that ripened too late, most people would’ve… Read more...

In a Powerful Episode of The Magicians, Eliot and Alice Try to Pick Up the 'Beautiful Pieces'

Gone but never forgotten , Quentin Coldwater continues to leave echoes on the latest season of The Magicians . Now it’s Alice and Eliot’s turn to take their final steps toward healing in what originally felt like a weird, unlikely team-up. But by the end, you realize it may have been the most natural and necessary thing… Read more...

Thursday's Best Deals: Electric Blankets, Fancy Pajamas, Mucinex Gold Box, and More

A Jack Link’s jerky Gold Box , refurbished MacBook Pros , and a Columbia sale lead off Thursday’s best deals from around the web. Read more...

This Is the Most Accurate Baby Yoda Replica You Can Buy

So far, 2020 hasn’t exactly gotten off to a great start, what with a terrifying virus quickly spreading across the planet. It’s not all doomsday news, however, this year also promises to bring us mountains of Baby Yoda merchandise, and Sideshow Collectibles is leading the charge with this life-size and staggeringly… Read more...

These Soft Robots 'Sweat' to Keep Cool

An international team of scientists has developed a soft robotic hand that literally perspires in response to excess heat. This innovative concept could improve the durability and endurance of robots, while also allowing them to work in extreme environments. Read more...

The Crow May Get Another Chance at Life (Again)

Loki may get an intriguing co-star in his Disney+ series. Harley Quinn is in a tough spot in a new Birds of Prey scene and we’ve got our first clip of older Bill S. Preston Esquire via an early Super Bowl commercial. Plus updates from Legends of Tomorrow , Riverdale , and more. Spoilers, away! Read more...

You Don't Have the Coronavirus, It's Just a Cold. Get Some Mucinex While It Is On Sale

Mucinex Cold and Flu Relief Gold Box | Amazon Read more...

On Star Trek: Picard, Everyone But Starfleet's Got Their House in Order

Star Trek: Picard ’s premiere re-introduced us to a world where the Federation feels more beaten back and weary of its ideals than it has in years—even than when it was actively at war. Its second episode reveals this weariness has rendered its finest champions frustratingly aimless, to the advantage of friend and foe… Read more...

Tesla Battery Day Will Describe Path to 2 Terawatt Hours Per Year in Batteries

Tesla battery drive train day is tentatively planned for April, 2020. Tesla would describe the challenges reach 2000 gigawatt-hours of batteries every year. If that level of batteries was only for making 100 KWH cars then it would be 20 million cars per year. This would more likely be 10 million cars, one hundred thousand semi-trucks and storage products. Elon said that Tesla is still a few months from being feature complete with self-driving. Feature complete self-driving means that you have a good chance of the human driver not being required to intervene from driving from one location to another

The Final Scene of Arrow Came to Its Producer...Mid-Meditation

There’s something very DC/CW-niverse-y about the idea that Arrow —the show that started it all  as a grounded and (occasionally) self-serious comic book adaptation—got the inspiration for its very last scene from someone who was mid-tranquil-state. You could almost say it appeared as a vision. Read more...

For Some X-Men, Death Still Matters

In the penultimate issue of Jonathan Hickman, Pepe Larraz, and Marte Gracia’s House of X , Charles Xavier’s grand plan to ensure that no X-Men ever truly die again is revealed. In the months since then, the concept of death has become something different for the world’s population of mutants. People carrying x-genes… Read more...

5 Really Good Ways To Deal With Red Wine Stains

It’s the end of January, which means two things: Many of you are about to break your Dry January fast and also, oh God, there is so much of winter still left to go. SO BRING ON THE RED WINE! Red wine is wonderful in so many ways but oof, is it ever stain-y. Which is why it’s handy, if you’re a regular (or even… Read more...

What Does the New Emoji Sign Say?

More than 100 new emoji were officially announced on Wednesday, among them more inclusive emoji , a “ pinched fingers emoji ,” and a dodo bird . But one emoji in particular—the newly introduced placard—confounded Gizmodo staffers, all of whom read radically different wording on the sign. Read more...

Poe Dameron's Spice-Running Origin Story Will Be Told in a New Book

We love Poe Dameron . You love Poe Dameron . Everyone loves Poe Dameron. And while Marvel’s Poe Dameron comic book series taught us a lot about the hotshot Star Wars pilot, we’ll soon learn a whole bunch more. Read more...

Charge Your New (Or Old) Gear With a $14 Dual-Port Charger for $14 [Exclusive]

Xcentz 36W USB-C Power Adapter PD Fast Charger | $14 | Amazon | Use the promo code KINJA3591 Read more...

Two Satellites Could Smash Into Each Other Over the U.S. Tonight

A pair of decommissioned satellites are at risk of colliding later today, potentially producing hundreds if not thousands of new pieces of space debris. Regardless of what happens, however, this incident illustrates our dire need for sensible space management practices. Read more...

In The Pale Horse Trailer, Rufus Sewell Is Warned Some Witches Are Trying to End Him

A magical mystery unfolds in the first trailer for Amazon Studios ’ The Pale Horse , based on the Agatha Christie novel about a man who learns of a group of witches who may be responsible for a series of mysterious deaths—including, one day, his own. But are these women actually damning their victims, or is something… Read more...

Visual Scanning of the Chemical Structure of Single Molecules at Angstrom Resolution

Nanocavity plasmonic fields can create Raman images of molecular vibration for a visual system that can map the chemical structure of single-molecule. This visual system has 0.1 nanometer (an angstrom) resolution. They merge the images at several different vibration modes to generate the image with the chemical structure. Arxiv has the full article. Scanning Raman picoscopy (SRP) is the first optical microscopy technique that has the ability to visualize the vibrational modes of a molecule and to directly construct the structure of a molecule in real space. The protocol established in this proof-of-principle demonstration can be generalized to identify other

Explore the Sad Origins of Mary Shelley in This Comic Book Celebration of History's Inspiring Women

Next month, Kazoo magazine will release its first book—a comics anthology celebrating the lives of influential, inspiring female figures throughout history. To celebrate, we’ve got an exclusive look at the book’s take on Mary Shelley, who changed sci-fi forever with her tale of tragic monsters and dark experimentation . Read more...

Wednesday's Best Deals: Everlane Choose What You Pay, Rice Cooker, Puzzles, and More

A PC accessory Gold Box , Timbuk2 sale , $5 ring light and an AOC monitor lead off Tuesday’s best deals from around the web. Read more...

Warcraft 3: Reforged Isn’t Much Of An Upgrade

The remastered version of Blizzard’s real-time strategy classic Warcraft 3 launched yesterday, and while I’m nowhere near as disappointed by the lack of enhancements and upgrades as the folks over at the official forums , Warcraft 3: Reforged certainly hasn’t impressed me. Read more...

Starlink Competitor OneWeb Targets First 34 Satellites in February 2020

OneWeb is competitor to the SpaceX Starlink satellite system. OneWeb successfully launched 6 test satellites and plans a February 7, 2020 Soyuz launch of its first 34 commercial satellites. OneWeb plans a 600 satellite system with 48 spare satellites. OneWeb would need 18 successful Soyuz launches to deploy their satellites. The first launch was already delayed from November 2019. They have ordered 21 Soyuz launches from Arianespace. They hope to get all the satellites up by the end of 2021. OneWeb is around one year behind SpaceX. SpaceX now has 180 production satellites in orbit. SpaceX is four successful launches

Arrow's Series Finale Was Really a Beginning for the Show's Most Underrated Character

Eight seasons and who knows how many arrowheads later, Oliver Queen has finally saved that damn city . Who would have thought back in 2012, watching that dirty, hairy man run around on an island, that all he needed to do was command some mighty cosmic powers? Read more...

SpaceX is Now Four Starlink Launches from Minimum Global Coverage

SpaceX successfully launched another 60 starlink satellites. There are now be 180 production starlink satellites in orbit. There are about 49 of the test production satellites. It is not known if the test production satellites can be used for the commercial network. 420 satellites are needed for minor broadband coverage of Earth and 780 of the first ~1600 for moderate coverage. SpaceX is four successful starlink launches from minimum global coverage and ten starlink launches from moderate coverage. SpaceX expects more than US$30 billion in revenue by 2025 from its satellite constellation, while revenues from its launch business were expected

Star Trek’s Past and Present Collide in Star Trek Online’s 10th Anniversary

Well, given the climax of Discovery’s second season, it’s more like Star Trek ’s present and far future . But either way, the stars of the two latest shows are teaming up to celebrate a decade of boldly going online. Read more...